Institutional Feedback and Reform Dynamics in EU Agri-Food Governance: A Configurational Analysis of National Responses to Food Safety oversight

Over the past three decades, agri-food policy in the European Union has undergone repeated reform in response to food safety crises, changing societal expectations, and evolving sustainability concerns. While much of the literature focuses on formal policy change, less attention has been paid to how national authorities adapt to, internalize, or resist reform pressures through everyday regulatory practice. This paper contributes to debates on agri-food policy reform by examining how institutional feedback from EU-level oversight shapes patterns of continuity and change in national food safety and animal health governance. We conceptualize reform dynamics through the lens of proportional regulatory response to European Commission oversight, operationalized using DG SANTE food safety and animal health audits across the EU-27. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we analyze how different configurations of institutional conditions, namely the separation of risk assessment from risk management, integration of risk management across public and animal health, institutional trust, and audit-based learning, shape national responses to EU oversight. Our findings reveal multiple pathways to proportionate regulatory responses, highlighting that reform dynamics in agri-food governance are not driven by a single “good governance” model. By shifting attention from formal reform episodes to the institutional processing of oversight and learning, the paper offers a novel perspective on how agri-food policy reform unfolds in practice and why reform trajectories diverge across EU member states.